Background 

Like many global organisations our client a medical equipment manufacturer, outsources its customer service to a third-party provider in order to deliver the best possible service to its customers, at scale. Davies has spent time working closely with them, and during completion of a learning project our team of bilingual consultants spotted significant challenges with the training delivery for new employees at their contact centre. 

These challenges were leading to lower performance, higher attrition of new starters, and difficulties maintaining professional standards. Looking to understand more and drive improvements, The client turned to Davies’ Learning Experiences team to evaluate its business process outsourcing (BPO) operations at its Bogota, Colombia, contact centre to assess the efficacy, quality, and standard of their training. 

How we helped 

To discover the best solution for our client, we immediately undertook a period of consultative analysis that involved reviewing materials, meeting with operational stakeholders, and getting into the detail of performance data. 

 Early on, it become clear that in order for any change or improvement to be made, it would require a delicate and considered approach to prevent any damage to the working relationship between our client and its third-party supplier. 

With this in mind, our team worked collaboratively with both parties, utilising our experience in BPO to deliver a report which outlined the challenges within the key areas of: 

• Recruitment 
• Systems/processes
• Onboarding 
• Customer Experience 
• People leadership and support 

 After reviewing and delivering the report, Davies facilitated conversations across all levels of seniority within the organisation with the aim to provide a platform for discussion, identify potential solutions, and create an environment where both parties could openly share thoughts through a readback process that was conducive to proactive change. The overarching objective was to make mutual improvements to strengthen the relationship, reduce reputational risk, and deliver better outcomes for patients in the US market and beyond. Our feedback was implemented at pace in terms of process, information security, people development, and learning materials. 

Results

The changes that were implemented as a result of our engagement have had an immediate and positive impact on our clients overall BPO operations. This has been achieved through a number of process improvements that have been put in place, as well as an increase in the quality of training being delivered. 

Along with the recruitment of new training staff, we also suggested fundamental changes to recruitment processes which led to improvements in market-appropriate language skills. Furthermore, the right communication channels have been put in place that no longer present privacy and safety risks for new starters. These changes led to: 

• An immediate decrease in new starter attrition from 13.4% to 7.14% 
• Time to basic competency was reduced from 5 weeks to 2.5 weeks 

In terms of performance, we found that segmenting the contact types helped to improve the overall efficiency of the centre across a number of metrics, including: 

• average handling time (AHT) was reduced from 18.12 minutes to 11.59 minutes 
• Quality scores increased from 77.50% to 91.40% 
• NPS (net promoter score) also saw a slight improvement, going from 54.55% to 58.30% 

 Following this work, The client asked Davies to create a full and transformative onboarding redevelopment that prioritises patient experience and confidence building. It uses a tiered approach to maximise development and provides an opportunity to retain, identify and promote talent through a staggered approach.